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What kind of times are these, when To talk about trees is almost a crime Because it implies silence about so many horrors …
In this evocatively titled book, Sharon Sliwinski argues that social and political events affect and enter into the formation of dreams more than psychoanalysts tend to acknowledge or discuss. “Dream-life, like so much of waking-life, is preoccupied with finding a means to represent our physical and mental states. But social and political matters also weigh on the mind, creating conflicts that demand to be represented and worked through, even in sleep” (p. xviii). Sliwinski believes, as well, that the communication of our dreams to another individual involves an effort to “exercise a measure of freedom despite the pressures of the time. … It is this latter gesture—the drive to disclose this experience to someone—that transforms dream-life into a political matter proper” (p. xiii). The book pursues the thesis that communicating a dream “can have profound significance for our social and political life together” (p. xii).
As Sliwinski states in her introduction, her aim is to show how dreams can preserve a measure of freedom in what Hannah Arendt has called “dark times”1—times when vast public evildoing is accompanied by the suppression of free speech such that social and political violence surrounds us but cannot be spoken of or, therefore, fully recognized. Public language at such times is designed to distort. Sliwinski references the Israeli novelist David Grossman, who describes how during dark times language “becomes flatter and flatter … gradually evolving into a series of clichés and slogans” (p. xix). This is also, of course, the strategy employed by the state in George Orwell's 1984, a strategy Orwell discusses in his essay “Politics and the English Language.” In our own day, we are all too familiar with public efforts to distort reality through the manipulation of language. Sliwinski argues th